Form should follow function. Throughout To Those Bounded, I employ a variety of tenses, structures, and points of view in service of the narrative intention. Tense is hugely important in conveying tone and emotion. For the opening, I wanted to pull the reader in with a sense of movement and urgency. The present tense does this well. […]
I DIDN’T KNOW MUCH about Robert Irwin’s work when I wandered into the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden a few weeks ago. I knew that he was a contemporary of a few other artists I admire, James Turrell among them, and that he was the first artist to win a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1984, […]
For the Kimbilio panel at AWP ’16, Cole Lavalais (’13, ’15) presented these remarks on directionality in fiction: Several years ago during my first semester in graduate school, some of my classmates and I went out to a local watering hole after a rather tedious writing workshop. Which, by the way, was nothing new. I […]
Finding Michelle Kwan: A Black Boy’s Childhood on Ice By Dennis Norris II Long before it actually happened, I tried to tell the world that I was a figure skater. I tried on Saturday afternoons, back in the nineties when skating was on TV every weekend. I tried by pushing all the furniture to the edges […]
FROM SMOKE LONG QUARTERLY Smoke and Mirrors: An Interview with Dennis Norris II Your story, “Daddy’s Boy,” devastated me when I first read it, flooded me with discomfort. I had to step away and think about it, come back to it and read it again and then sort through competing emotions: admiration, disgust, sympathy. What […]
http://therumpus.net/2016/05/the-saturday-rumpus-interview-darryl-pinckney/
Kimbilio Nurtures Black Writers by Morgan Jerkins NEWS AND TRENDS March/April 2016 2.10.16 While Cave Canem’s annual retreat for African American poets has been changing the literary landscape for the past twenty years, the writing community has lacked a similar resource for African American fiction writers. That is, it did until 2013, when writers David […]
From DEATH AND TAXES: The first time I listened to Beyoncé’s “Formation,” I was en route to the Brooklyn Museum for an event commemorating Black History Month. While sitting in the back of a cab, I held my phone close to my face, trying to relate to what Black Twitter instantly embraced as a groundbreaking […]
